Mentally ill homeless being offered a new salvation

Valerie Miller

Monday, Feb. 28, 2000 | 10:44 a.m.

The Salvation Army is expanding its services to perhaps the most difficult-to-reach segment of the homeless population -- the mentally ill.

The 25-bed "Safe Haven," the Salvation Army's new program for the homeless with mental illnesses, was to dedicated today. Due to open next month, the new building at 31 W. Owens Ave. will be an addition to the Salvation Army's Owens campus, which already has Pathways, a group home for up to 42 seriously mentally ill people.

The campus also includes a 32-bed women's rehabilitation facility and 70 one-bedroom apartments for graduates of the rehab program. That's in addition to cots and beds for other homeless people the Salvation Army serves, for a total of about 400 beds for the homeless.

Safe Haven clients will be allowed to stay in the program, which provides shelter during the day and night as well as counseling and training, as long as they need to, Salvation Army spokesman Sumner Dodge said. The idea is to work with them until they can re-enter mainstream society, he said.

The program, which will hold 14 men and 11 women, already has a waiting list, Duane Sonnenberg, the Salvation Army's administrator for homeless services, said. "And it won't be open until the middle of March."

A recent study of homeless people in Southern Nevada by UNLV researchers counted close to 7,000 last year -- about 17 percent of whom said they had been diagnosed with a mental illness, said Jim Frey, dean of UNLV's College of Liberal Arts and a sociologist.

Another 32 percent reported they had a problem with alcohol, and 17 percent admitted to drug problems, he said.

Those are the problems the Salvation Army plans to treat.

"Often those people diagnosed with a mental illness also have some sort of addictions," Sonnenberg said.

"The Safe Haven is designed to be an emergency shelter for homeless individuals who also have a serious mental illness," Sonnenberg said. "It will give them a safe, clean environment where they can stay and we can interact with them, so that they will seek treatment."

As part of the services of Safe Haven, a social worker from Clark County Social Services will be at the shelter full time, Sonnenberg said.

Many of the current homeless residents who suffer from mental illness credit the Salvation Army's program with turning their lives around.

"Before coming here I was suicidal, and I didn't care about life anymore," Dale Hansink, 50, a former high school teacher from Utah, said.

"I came to Vegas in desperation to get my life right," said Hansink, who said he has been diagnosed with manic-depressive disorder and a borderline personality disorder.

Hansink said that before coming to the Salvation Army shelter, he was in and out of rehabilitation facilities three times because of drug and alcohol addictions, heart problems and bleeding ulcers.

"I've been clean and sober now for seven months," said Hansink, who is in a 12-step treatment program. He is now in a Salvation Army vocational rehab program training to be a desk clerk.

"I plan on going to UNLV eventually to be recertified as a teacher," Hansink said. "Being here, I turned around 180 degrees. But if somebody had told me a year ago I would be at a Salvation Army shelter, I would have laughed in their face."

While a common myth about the homeless is that they have little education or job training, the UNLV survey found that 10 percent of the homeless have a college degree, 6 percent had a steady job and another 6 percent had a temporary job, Frey said.

Many people at the shelter said they found themselves homeless after struggling for years with mental illness coupled with drug and alcohol addictions.

"I was doing OK in Vegas for a while," Michael Shadle, 50, a Vietnam veteran, said. "I've been in Vegas for five years, and I had a job, but I overdosed on heroin and came down with a stroke."

Shadle, who now uses a cane when walking, said that after the war he was diagnosed with Post Traumatic Stress Syndrome along with severe depression. He, like Hansink, said going to the Salvation Army seven months ago turned his life around.

"It gave me a structure I can build on," said Shadle, who is now learning computer technology. "I'm clean and sober now. It's done a lot for me."

Along with the Safe Haven project will be a community response team -- a social worker and a mental health assistant -- to seek out homeless people who are mentally ill and to respond to calls reporting people who may be mentally ill and homeless, Sonnenberg explained.

The team will take the person to Safe Haven or another safe location. While some such crisis teams are provided by for-profit mental health hospitals, they don't meet the needs of the homeless mentally ill, who are often uninsured, Sonnenberg said.

"These people who are mentally ill and homeless might otherwise be arrested and incarcerated or taken to a hospital emergency room because there are few other places for them," he said.

Sonnenberg said that the Safe Haven team will also work closely with Metro Police, who have their own program to help the homeless, the Homeless Evaluation Liaison Project, or HELP. That program tries to get homeless people off the streets and into shelters instead of them landing in the Clark County Detention Center.

"I think it will give us a cushion or safety net that we didn't have before because now when we find a mentally ill person who needs help, there's somebody we can call 24 hours a day," Metro Officer Erik Fricker of the HELP unit said.

"We'll probably be there every day. We want to be sure these people have the same access to police that somebody would who lives in Summerlin," he said. "Every homeless person I've ever talked to will say they've been the victim of some sort of crime, and this is especially true of the mentally ill."

Southern Nevada Adult Mental Health Services has an outreach program similar to Safe Haven's to help mentally ill homeless people, said Chelsea Szklany, coordinator for residential programs for individuals with mental illness and a member of Southern Nevada's Homeless Coalition. She welcomed the Safe Haven program, and said even that won't be enough to meet the needs in Southern Nevada.

"The Safe Haven is wonderful, but there are still large gaps," she said. "We need more of these facilities, definitely."

Sonnenberg agrees that even with the new Safe Haven, there is much more that needs to be done.

"There were close to 7,000 homeless counted by the UNLV survey and we -- Salvation Army, MASH Village, Catholic Charities of Southern Nevada, Shade Tree, the Las Vegas Rescue Mission and a few small shelters -- have 1,500 combined beds for the homeless," he said.

Valerie Miller is a reporter for the Sun. She can be reached at (702) 259-2319 or by e-mail at valerie@lasvegassun.com.